As Dorothy Cummings McLean’s new novel Ceremony of Innocence hit bookshelves in North America, we interviewed The Catholic Register columnist via a video call about pop culture, Catholic literature and the lives of her characters. Below is an edited and abridged transcript of our chat with Dorothy.

In Michael Coren’s new book, The Future of Catholicism, the award-winning Catholic Register columnist warns the Church will face “enormous pressure” on the issue of euthanasia. Here is an excerpt from his book.

VATICAN CITY - While a military-backed dictatorship in Argentina was conducting a clandestine war on suspected dissidents, then-Fr. Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the future Pope, masterminded a secret strategy to save those being targeted, according to a new book.

“You are what you eat from your head down to your feet!” So said Time for Timer, a character in public service announcements that appeared between Saturday morning cartoons in the 1970s. He encouraged kids to listen to their bodies and to think about what goes in. After all, as Timer said, “You are what you swallow.”

To live simply is not simple in our over-consuming culture. But it should be our goal if we want to be healthier, more ethical and better connected to God and the green Earth we’ve been given to watch over.

When I picked up this hefty tome, a compendium of snippets from Franciscan Father Richard Rohr’s many writings (some of it previously unpublished), I expected a series of reflections in familiar groupings: personal faith, compassion, social justice, the natural world, grief — the standard mix that is often a blessing to preachers or educators who need a little help getting started on a selected topic or biblical passage.

It is not inevitable that a Catholic book about ethics must become a Catholic book about sex. Despite the popular notion that morality is the conservative, judgmental and unkind mode of talking about sex, Catholic moral science is not primarily a list of forbidden thoughts and acts which originate south of the belt buckle.